Newer Than They Think / Literature

• Many, if not most of our available, ancient-looking Aztec and Mayan texts, were actually written after the Spanish Conquest, the result of Spanish missionaries like Bernardino de Sahagún recruiting Christianized native priests, scribes and artists to record and translate all they knew about their history and culture (which came in handy when other, less personable characters like Diego de Landa went around burning indigenous art, an action which got him actually demoted from his job and tried in Spain). The Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayans, is actually a Spanish compilation in the original language which might or might not be the first time ever the Mayans put the story on written record.
• Stream-of-consciousness in writing was first used in 1888 in Edouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (although Anna Karenina (1873-77) contains some proto-examples). James Joyce, the modern codifier for this technique, himself expressed annoyance at people's Small Reference Pools:
  James Joyce: When I hear the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new... Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
• The Aesops in Aesop's Fables were not made explicit and clear when the stories were first written, let alone when they were first told.
• The prose poem "Desiderata" has been widely attributed to being found in an old church and dated 1692 but was written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. The 20th-century English it's written in gives it away.
• Lower-case letters were first developed in the eighth century, as a kind of shorthand used by bureaucrats who worked for Charlemagne. Documents and literary works older than this were written IN ALLCAPS ONLY.
  • There was a form of shorthand for the Roman alphabet prior to this, but it had been forgotten by the time modern minuscules were created. It can still be seen on some inscriptions.
  • Lower-case and upper-case letters weren't mixed until the 14th century. Before then, documents would only use one or the other (formal documents and books were upper-case, while informal bureaucratic notes were lower-case.)
  • Until the early 19th century, nouns were usually capitalized in English writing (personal names often being in italics); this practice survives in German to this day.
• Standardized spelling at a national level is also a recent phenomenon, traced back to when dictionaries were first compiled. In English this was Samuel Johnson's dictionary in 1755. Medieval scribes spelled words however they wanted, and didn't care about consistency, often spelling a word multiple ways even within a single page of text.
• Until approximately 1800, the letter 's' had two forms, the more common being the long s, which looks almost identical to an 'f'.
• Most depictions of Frankenstein have little to do with Mary Shelley's original work. In the original book there is no Igor, castle, or angry peasants storming the place. In fact, Victor Frankenstein realizes right after making his monster what a horrible mistake he made (in fact, that's the problem). The monster himself, in contrast to most depictions, is quite articulate and of remarkable agility. The story most people think of originates from the 1931 film of the same name. Igor was popularized by 1970s Young Frankenstein which parodied a tradition that coalesced from various mad scientists' henchmen over the years, some being named variously Igor or Ygor, since Son of Frankenstein in 1939. (The 1931 film didn't have an Igor though it contained a similar character named Fritz.)
  • And various movies notwithstanding, Victor Frankenstein was neither a doctor nor a baron, and he was not from Transylvania; he was a Swiss student from Geneva at Ingolstadt University.
  • Likewise, the monster was never referred to as Frankenstein in the novel, even though people have started doing so in recent years. Frankenstein was his creator. Also, in the book, the monster isn't a mindless killing machine. He displays many human traits and can even be viewed as sympathetic in some parts, although he certainly does some terrible things as the plot progresses. ^note  The real monster is, arguably, "good" Victor's horrible parenting skills, as they are what drive the creature to desperation and murder.
    • This may be a case of the viewers being better than expected at catching the themes rather than worse. The implication of the book is that the creature is effectively Victor Frankenstein's son. Traditionally in Europe, a son carries the surname of the father. Ergo the monster's name is, in fact, Frankenstein... no matter how much time Victor spends throughout the book denying it.
  • Also, when people think of the creation of the Monster, they envision it being brought to life by a bolt of lightning, which is what happened in the 1931 film. In the novel, the reader never learns how Frankenstein was able to bring his creature to life because he explicitly left the details out so that nobody could ever repeat his mistake.
    • Though it may have been how Victor made the creature in the novel, as he marvels at the power of a lightning bolt striking an oak tree shortly before leaving for Ingolstadt, the place of creation.
  • The Monster was not made from corpses. Victor Frankenstein studied dead bodies and decay to learn the secrets of life, but the creature itself was made from scratch.
  • The book also alludes to several historcial alchemist which implies that Victor used a method like that of a Homunculus.
• Orcs, "halflings" and tall, beautiful elves are such a staple in fantasy nowadays that when one reads The Lord of the Rings it's tempting to react with It's Been Done. However, Tolkien invented much of those concepts, apart from his elvish depiction. This originated in ancient Icelandic and Germanic beliefs about The Fair Folk — he talks about the history, in terms of beliefs about elves or fairies being little creatures, in his essay "On Fairy-Stories". Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter was the first work of literature to depart from the concept of elves as "little people". Despite that, most of the modern depictions of elves take their inspiration from Tolkien's elves, and in more than just appearance.
  • Many people are unaware that ents were not actually a part of traditional mythology. Although the idea of talking walking trees did not originate with Tolkien: many depictions of dryads are like Tolkien's ents.
• Ivan Barkov is best known for his obscene poem "Luka Mudischev", with all the other works being secondary, and non-obscene works being all but forgotten. Except that even the most basic analysis of "Luka" shows it was written about a century after Barkov, and other works attributed date from as late as the 20th century.
• Novels as we know them are only 200-300 years old (Don Quixote, the first modern novel, was published in 1605-1615). Older long-form fiction was mostly Based on a Great Big Lie or an epic poem. Though you could argue that Chrétien de Troyes wrote quite an epic... novel in the XIIth century, which was adapted a few years later by Robert de Boron under the name Le roman du Graal — literally "The novel of the Graal". And in the XIVth, Helie de Boron even avoided verses.
• In the musical The Music Man, Harold Hill refers to "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang", which was a joke magazine that didn't exist until World War I. However, the show is set in 1912. Ironic, considering that the story makes a plot point that Gary, Indiana, is newer than Harold Hill thinks (or would rather have River City believe).
• Dr. Seuss' book Oh, the Places You'll Go!, that ubiquitous graduation gift. It must be from the 1950s or earlier, right? Nope. It was first published in 1990, and was the last thing he published before his death in 1991.
• "Goldilocks" must be a ridiculously ancient tale, right? Nope. It was invented by British author Robert Southey and first published in 1837, and in his version, the protagonist is an unnamed, ugly, elderly woman. An 1849 edition changed her to a little girl named "Silver-Hair", and a 1904 version finally named her "Goldilocks".
• The whole concept of writing itself counts: the oldest known written words (well, pictographs at least) are about 5200 years old. While this is a long time from the perspective of a human lifespan, even the shortest estimates of the age of the human species (Homo sapiens) are around 100,000 years old, meaning humans have only had writing for (at most) 5 percent or so of their existence. To put it another way, if you condense human history into a single year, Homo sapiens emerged on New Year's Day, but they didn't develop writing until the 12th of December.
• Norse runes were still used in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century.
• The earliest published version of "The Three Little Pigs" dates to 1840, and even then, was much different from current iterations, which are based on Joseph Jacobs' version from 1890, which introduced the familiar structure and phrasing of the tale ("Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin", etc.) Even then, it didn't become one of the pre-eminent children's stories until the smash success of the Disney version in 1933.
• There were no spaces between written words in European languages until the 7th or 8th century, spaces being popularized by Scottish and Irish monks who were tired of having to parse unfamiliar Latin words. Writers in the classical world wroteeverythingasonelongstring, like so.
• Unlike many other established ancient texts, which have been studied for several centuries at least, the Code of Hammurabi was unknown until its rediscovery in 1901.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh is also a recent addition to the canon, having been unearthed in the 1850s and first translated into English in 1875.
• The use of the apologetic apostrophe in written Scots has only been used since the 18th century, to indicate how Scots words were different from their English cognates. It exists only because of the Anglicisation of Scotland, and the recognition among Scots writers that it was mostly native English speakers who would be reading their work. Older Scots works do not use these apostrophes, and there is now a movement to end its use.
• Chinese writing used no punctuation whatsoever until the Republican era (post-1911), when it imported several marks from European languages, such as periods, commas, and quotation marks.
• "April is the cruellest month." William Shakespeare, right? Or at least some Elizabethan writer? No, it's the opening line of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land from 1922.
• Beowulf is one of the definitive classics of English literature, but despite dating to the 11th century (or even earlier), it was never transcribed until 1786, until which point it survived in a single damaged manuscript.
• While The Divine Comedy was written between 1308 and 1321, it was not substantially translated into English until 1782.
• The October 16, 1997 issue of The New York Times was the first to be printed in color, before which the paper was black-and-white exclusively.

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